VuFind Developers Call Minutes: March 17, 2015

Attending: Judy Brink-Drescher, Chris Delis, Chris Hallberg, John Jung, Demian Katz, Jochen Lienhard, Tod Olson

• VUFIND-599 - This ticket should have been closed a while ago when hierarchical facets were merged to master; Demian just noticed and closed it a little late.
• VUFIND-1035 - Demian has closed the code generators ticket now that we have infrastructure for this; feel free to open new tickets suggesting specific generators that would be of use to you.
• VUFIND-1095 - This ticket requests a more flexible way of handling recommendation modules in the combined search view.
• VUFIND-1096 - The text of the confirm dialog box messages has been changed from Confirm/Cancel to Yes/No; this ticket is a reminder to check whether other language files would benefit from an equivalent change during the next translation cycle.
• VUFIND-1097 - This ticket reports some invalid markup in the bootstrap3 theme (it is now fixed).

• #292 - in progress - Chris and Demian have continued to make progress on an improved tagging UI (currently only in the bootstrap3 theme); feedback on the interface would be appreciated.
• #310 - in progress - expands the test class for the DAIA driver.
• #311 - merged - improves Koha compatibility (support for new-style password hashing)
• #312 - merged - improves performance by lazy-loading QR Code images
• #313 - merged - this was not merged as-is, but it inspired an improvement to the @parent_ini handling in language files which makes language inheritance more robust and flexible
• #314 - merged - bug fix: do not attempt to load empty IDs from the database
• #315, #318 - merged - workaround for an ICU library bug that caused problems with currency display for some locales
• #316 - merged - bug fix: minor markup error
• #317 - merged - bug fix: CSS improvement
• #319 - in progress - a simplification of the advanced search implementation to reduce Javascript complexity and redundancy

Demian has merged the call number improvements pull request (#305), and SolrMarc has been upgraded to a new release containing all of Tod and Anna's enhancements.

Tod will be doing a production-level test of this soon. So will Demian.

One minor outstanding issue: Tod will update the callnumber.bsh to match the updated Java.

Tod is looking for other institutions with complex call number prefixing issues in case some further work can be done in that direction.

Demian has added route generation code generators (merging PR #307).

Since Demian opened pull request #306 for upgrading to Solr 4.10.3, Solr 4.10.4 and Solr 5 have both been released.

As previously mentioned, Solr 5 will require some new deployment strategies; perhaps something to think about for a VuFind 3 release.

In the meantime, getting up to the latest Solr 4.x will require some SolrMarc work. Tod suggested writing to vufind-tech to double-check whether we can eliminate SolrMarc's direct index writing mode, which is the main sticking point on forward compatibility.

One bit of good news: Demian has reviewed the new solr.xml format and has found a setting that should allow us to enable ALL of VuFind's Solr cores (even the optional ones) without unreasonable overhead. Cores can be configured to load “on demand.” Demian has reconfigured pull request #306 accordingly.

At this point, a March 23 release seems feasible. No objections.

Demian will be out of town on March 31. Chris will run the call in his absence.

Tod reminded the list of his problem with modifier characters in Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, etc.; he posted to vufind-tech about this and is hoping for replies.

The next call will be Tuesday, March 31, 2015 at 10am Eastern Daylight Time (14:00 GMT).